It was great before corporations took over.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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The Internet is still cool, you idiots just keep going to the same five sites.
Sounds like a wonderful man. I hope they raised enough money for treatment.
I've decides to pretend its 1998, so it's Newgrounds, webcomics and OSR blogs for me.
Right?! The Internet is full of cool shit still.
It's so often depressing on Lemmy, with the same few sad/angry people shitting on everything. Break out of your bubble and go explore. Find joy again.
We need a community that displays all that cool shit
!internetisbeautiful@lemm.ee is what you're looking for.
Please, make a website. Open notepad, write some jank html, and be proud of it. It literally doesn't matter what you put on it, comics, a blog, I don't care, just make a website, make a little corner of the internet for yourself.
While there are still cool places to explore in the internet, yeah, it sucks that people help to spread the same tending things. I think platforms like Meta, Google, etc. are the culprit. They hook people into their so-called ecosystems and people just can't see the cage they are inviting others to inhabitate.
BTW, do people still meet online and get married from random chats?
BTW, do people still meet online and get married from random chats?
More than they used to, I personally know 2 couples who met in FFXIV and one who met in a piracy IRC of all places
who met in a piracy IRC
The most based backstory lol
Big shout out to some muscians like DEBBY FRIDAY, DEBBY FRIDAY's blog, and Amyl and the Sniffers for makign websites that are just a blast of fresh air.
Amyl and the sniffers are GOAT
hotdog stand my beloved
Neocities, the Fediverse, and Gemini Protocol sites are where I spend the vast majority of my online free-time, and it's so much more pleasant than the big corporate slop websites
Shout out to all these forums all these forums that still exist!
Man, the internet used to be so cool.
It's still is, the problem is that now most people think the so called platforms as the Internet.
Nah. Forums are mostly dead, most websites are ad-enhanced garbage and the proliferation of right-wing fucking morons in ALL THE COMMENT SECTIONS turned the internet to mostly shit. Its not anywhere near the quality from back in the days.
Not sure if forums are dead. I still get some information from (German) forums where the hardcore techies or enthusiasts hang.
You used to be able to find forums on any weird subject. Tech stuff has always been the easiest to find, it's basically one of the only subjects for which you can even find somewhat active Lemmy communities (!).
Almost everything else has become Reddit communities or Discord servers.
or even worse than Reddit communities or Discord servers, they're facebook groups a lot of the time too. I feel like I can't find any association or organization for well, any sort of activity, without needing a fucking facebook account to be able to join their group on there.
Reddit is getting there fast really, popup after popup of constant nagging and such a terrible enshittified UI they just had to kill any effort to make it better by closing their API.
Discord servers are invisible to the outside world, which means you can't discover the ones you might be interested in. And once you're in, hope you don't have to look for something in particular, because search function is terrible and the UI is actively fighting against you when you try to look any message farther back than a page or two. It's really made for discussion, they tried getting better at being a content source but they still suck at it.
But yeah, any content that's on Facebook may as well not exist for me. My account (that I had already created only so I could access walled stuff) has been closed for more than a decade now.
Yeah, mikrocontroller.net is still going strong :) The internet overall just was more interesting than today, simply because big corporations didn't pollute it yet with their garbage.
The big, enshittified platforms take away most of the traffic and creative energy even from the couple of places that are basically cool, and on top of that many small sites have to deal with complicated regulations (a lot of which is kind of necessary because there is SO much violent propaganda on the internet nowadays, but at the same time they clearly diminish the experience compared to a site that isn't strongly regulated but just doesn't get targeted by bullshit as much).
The problem is that people just use search engines that categorize websites with algorithms and serve the most popular ones (which are these platforms) so this is the only side of the internet they are exposed to.
Internet used to be a cool toy. Now it's a useful tool. You can still find cool toys if you look tho.
Helps if you have kids. Middle school is still the wild west and anything can come out of it. Kids always find the toys.
I think what you are calling toys are what I would call addictions. They can get innovative with finding ways to access those addictions, but really they just want that mind numbing, repetative flashing lights and noises. Anything to shut down and avoid thinking, like a bunch of zombies.
Sorry. That's just the rant of a 7th grade teacher.
Well yeah that happens too, but they also use things in ways you'd never expect, mainly with the goal of being fun.
I don't know what it says about me that I instantly recognize that Salad Fingers poster.
One doesn't ever really forget salad fingers.
So. which parts of reddit did they walk into?
/r/handholding
/r/sounding
Was his hand split in half? Did the internet do that?
I think that’s the artist showing his hand making the motion of cutting across the throat like people often do to say “stop doing that immediately.”
Oh, I see now. I thought it was split in half and stitched back together.
Thanks to all the influence operations, surveillance, AI slop, malicious scrapers, spam and bad-faith ideologues (from all sides).
Edit: typpo